50 years ago - April 4 of 1958, Johnny Stompanato is knifed to death in the home of film actress Lana Turner. Her daughter, Cheryl Crane was investigated for murder but a coroner's jury came back with a verdict of justifiable homicide. Supposedly, Stompanato, the star's boyfriend, had threatened to disfigure Turner but he wasn't there to give his side.

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This my opinion and to the best of my knowledge, that is, if I'm not joking.

100 years ago - 1908 April 28 - The La Porte, Indiana farm of serial killer Belle Gunness is reduced to ashes in a highly suspicious fire. No one knows how many she killed but it almost certainly ranged into the dozens if not much higher. By all indications, she faked her own death in the conflagration and escaped, never to be captured.

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This my opinion and to the best of my knowledge, that is, if I'm not joking.

50 years ago - 1958 May 6 - Margaret Elizabeth Rheeder is hanged in South Africa for murdering her husband with ant poison. She motive was inheritance, insurance and to remove him as an impediment to her extramarital love life.

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This my opinion and to the best of my knowledge, that is, if I'm not joking.

100 years ago - 1908 May 11 - A girl named Louise Staula is found beaten to death in a field near Dedham, Massachusetts. After a month, Anthony Santo, a fourteen year-old, confessed to the killing. He was also tied to the murders of two young boys from earlier in the year. The teenage serial killer was determined to be unfit to stand trial and sent to an asylum for the criminally insane.

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This my opinion and to the best of my knowledge, that is, if I'm not joking.

50 years ago - 1958 May 13 - Gaetane Bouchard vanishes while shopping in New Brunswick. It was later found that the teenager had been murdered and dumped in a gravel pit. Her former boyfriend, John Vollman, was convicted of the slaying and sentenced to death but that was later commuted to life in prison.

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This my opinion and to the best of my knowledge, that is, if I'm not joking.

100 years ago - 1908 June 1 - In her Paris home, Jeanne-Marguerite Steinheil is found tied up and screaming. Nearby, her husband and mother are laying dead by strangulation. She claimed that a gang had attacked them but, when she sent a servant to retrieve some supposedly stolen property, she was charged with murder. Mrs. Steinheil, however, was acquitted at trial, leaving the murders officially unsolved. No one else was ever charged and, if she was involved, there would have to have been accomplices.

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This my opinion and to the best of my knowledge, that is, if I'm not joking.

A number of years ago I saw a book in the Strand bookshop which I made the mistake of not purchasing. It was a look at three fin - de - siec French cases that involved upper crust French women as defendants between 1900 and 1914. They were the Humbert "Millions" scam, the Steinheil murder case, and the shooting of Gaston Calmette of LE FIGARO by Madame Caillaux.
The book's purpose was to get a closer look at the corruption in upper crust French society in that period that led to those three scandals.

Madame Humbert was well connected to French political circles (her father or father-in-law had been a Finance Minister in one of the cabinets). Her story about millions of francs from an inheritance (from an American) and a "friendly" legal action preventing the settlement, enabled her to get many banks to advance huge sums to her and her husband for their purposes for nearly a decade before their bluff was finally called. She did get a prison sentence, but much was swept under the table (including at least one opportune, unsolved death).

Madame Steinheil was a society beauty, married to a painter. She was also constantly having affairs, one of which led to a peculiar "tragedy" in 1899, when her then lover, President Felix Faure of France, apparently died during a sexual encounter with her (heart attack most likely) in their bed at the Elysee Palace. It had some effect on history: Faure was not likely to be merciful to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and his removal put in a more reasonable President - just in time for Dreyfus' trial at Rennes. The murders of Steinheil's
husband and mother brought back memories of the earlier scandal, and may
have pushed the authorities harder to indict and prosecute the lady for those murders. She beat their efforts, and later remarried.

Calmette, as editor of LE FIGARO, was opposed to the policies of Joseph Caillaux, a Socialist politician of standing. In 1912 Caillaux had been Prime Minister when the Second Moroccan Crisis (Wilhelmine Germany sent a gunboat, the "Panther", to Morocco due to some believed slight to it's interests in the French colony). The earlier Crisis in Morocco in 1906 led to an international meeting where France was supported by the majority of the countries involved, including Germany's supposed ally Italy. This Caillaux decided to avoid that situation again. He studied the matter, and gave a little bit of territory (nothing very valuable) to Germany. The Germans, faced with French acquiescence this time, had to accept it as a "victory". But many French professional patriots like Calmette were outraged. Caillaux believed in forgetting the Franco-Prussian War and the loss of Alsace Lorraine. Instead he felt cooperation between the two biggest industrial powers in Western Europe made more sense. This actually sensible policy was met with dirision, and Caillaux's government collapsed. But within two years he was finance minister in a new Socialist government. Calmette got possession (from the first Mrs. Caillaux) of letters Joseph wrote his then mistress Margarite of a personal nature. Calmette began publishing them to make Joseph Caillaux look foolish. Now married to Joseph, Margarite decided to stop further publications. She went to Calmette's offices and shot him.
Her trial for his murder led to an acquittal (which has itself been the subject of several books alone).

Ironically Caillaux had to resign from the government and concentrate on his wife's trial. That summer of 1914 it was the biggest murder story of France and much of Europe. Ironically enough it deterred Frenchmen (particularly Caillaux) from noticing the murders of an Austrian dignitary and his wife in Bosnia (yeah, Franz Ferdinand and Sophia his Countess at Sarajevo). By the time the Caillaux trial ended in August events had gone too far to be stopped and the First World War began. Of course, had Joseph Caillaux been still in the cabinet that summer he might have prevented French involvement in the matters in the Balkans.

50 years ago - 1958 June 21 - Geneva Ellroy is strangled and sexually assaulted in Los Angeles. The divorced woman was seen out on the town with an individual who became known as the "Swarthy Man". Earlier in the evening, the couple were also accompanied by a blond woman. Geneva's body was found the next day beside a lovers lane, partially covered with vegetation. Neither the man nor the woman companions were ever identified. Mrs. Ellroy's son, James, went on to become a famous mystery writer. A few, not me, think that she may have been murdered by the same man who killed the Black Dahlia.

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This my opinion and to the best of my knowledge, that is, if I'm not joking.